My Mother Sold Me to Pay Her Dealer, and the Man Who Took Me From Him Has a Use for Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Lock on the Inside

In a room on the old mill's top floor with a bolt on her side, Bronwen sleeps for the first time in nine weeks while a man's shadow stays under her door.

The car smelled of leather and cold coffee, and nobody spoke for miles.

The driver was a heavy man in a gray cap who looked at the road and nothing else.

Valentine Corvino sat on the far side of the back seat with the length of the seat between us, his hands on his knees, and watched the window.

I kept my hand on the door handle.

I had not decided what I would do with it.

We went down Genesee Street and over the bridge, and the city went from lit to dark, to old brick with the snow piling on its windowsills.

The river ran black on my right.

Beyond it stood a long dead building with a hundred windows, and the car turned in at a chain-link gate.

KNIT WORKS, the sign said, in letters that had once been red.

Mill, I thought.

I knew about the mill.

My grandmother had spent thirty-one years on its third floor, and my mother had once typed its payroll.

The driver got out and opened the gate with a key on a ring.

The car went through.

"Top floor," Valentine said.

It was the first thing he had said since the bar.

He said it to the driver, not to me.

An elevator that smelled of oil took us up four floors, and nobody spoke in that either.

At the end of a long hall with new carpet over old boards, he opened a door with a key and stepped aside.

I did not go in.

I looked at the lock, and then at him.

"The bolt's on your side," he said.

He put the key in my hand without touching my fingers.

"There's a phone on the table with nothing in it but my number and a number for a taxi.

"The bathroom has hot water.

"A man will leave food in the hall.

"Nobody comes in unless you open the door."

I walked into the room.

It had a bed with a gray blanket and a table with a lamp and a small window that looked over the frozen river.

The bolt was on the inside, brass, new, as thick as my thumb.

I closed the door and shot it.

Then I stood with my forehead against the wood and listened to his steps go away down the carpet.

They did not hurry.

I let the breath out slowly through my teeth.

I was shaking and I did not know when it had started.

I took off the red dress and left it on the floor in a heap, and I did not touch it again.

On the bed lay a folded gray sweatshirt and a pair of men's wool socks that were still creased from the package.

There was a shower, and the water ran hot and kept running.

I stood under it until my skin hurt, and I did not cry.

I never cried in the room upstairs, either, and I thought that when I finally did, it would be somewhere that was mine.

Afterward I opened the door six inches on the chain I had not noticed.

A tray sat on the carpet.

Soup, bread, a bottle of water, a plastic fork.

Nothing else.

Nobody was in the hall.

I took it in and shot the bolt and ate every bite sitting on the floor with my back against the door.

I thought: he wants something.

Men who take a girl out of a bar want something, and the thing they want is usually the girl.

I knew the shape of that.

I had been trained to it for nine weeks.

But I had watched Valentine Corvino stand in the snow with his hands at his sides while I got into his car, and I could not make that fit.

I fell asleep sitting up against the door, with the fork still in my hand.

I woke once, in the dark, with my heart going.

The clock on the phone said three.

Something was in the hall.

I held my breath and listened for the sound that came before the bolt, the key or the shoulder, the soft voice saying Gigi.

None of it came.

There was only a shape in the line of light under the door.

Two shoes, standing still.

A man was on the other side, a foot from the wood.

"Nobody comes in," said a low voice, barely above a breath.

"That includes me."

I did not answer.

The shoes did not move.

I lay down on the carpet with my cheek on the floor, and watched them, and slept again.

The next time I woke it was light.

The shoes were gone.

The tray was new, and there was coffee on it, and a clean pair of jeans folded beside it that were my size.

My own scrubs from the ward locker lay under them, with my badge pinned to the top.

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